Work Text:
Life after saving the world, Jo finds, is surprisingly mundane.
The sun still rises, the world still turns. She still shovels down the same leftovers in the morning before the day’s work begins, still eats the same smorgasbord of whatever Coral packs her for lunch at the same dingy table in the break room of Grizzco’s Splatsville office. Minutes turn to hours turn to days and she still feeds the same off-brand hot chips to Buddy like he hadn’t recently turned into a giant fish monster in the middle of space, still does her best in ranked turf matches with a team she hasn’t told about any of this, and Grizzco, for as much as its founder had interwoven his image into its very brand, still runs the way it always has and does an eggcellent job of shoving her into shifts with the worst combinations of Salmonids she’s ever seen.
Life goes on like nothing had ever happened, like she hadn’t personally launched Mr. Grizz into the middle of fucking space, and it’s absolutely baffling.
She’d saved the world, the world moved on, some boring poetic metaphor about a Horrorboros eating its own tail, blah blah blah; the point of this whole shebang is that the world she saved keeps moving past the fact that she’d saved it.
And to be frank? Once you’ve peaked like that, everything else starts to feel a little boring. And boring’s… fine, she supposes. Things could be worse if her biggest problem is that she’s suffering from a bad case of bored bitch disease. At least she’s not almost dying in some crater anymore. Or getting in fights with the Deep Cut. Or eating sussy leftovers out of that trash can near the pizza place, and—fuck it, who is she kidding?
Boredom is a feeling so mid it goes full circle back around to being straight-up cringe.
Jo being bored has always had statistically poor outcomes. While she’s always been a horrible gambler, that does not stop her from looking at the routine that makes up her life, peering over all its hours and minutes and minutiae to find space to fit in something fresh, idly looking up articles of hobbies to try and activities to do, and taking one more roll of the dice.
She settles on trying to learn to knit.
Admittedly, it looks lame, but Jo figures people on Inktok must like it for a reason and the idea of Coral in a hand-knit scarf in some obscene shade of pastel pink she’d absolutely hate is just too funny to pass up. She’d also be reclaiming an apparently cool hobby from old farts, which is always a plus.
Jo grins.
She’s got this in the bag.
(Out of sight, out of mind, a single domino, the first in a line, begins to fall.)
Coral has always been downright secretive about anything to do with herself.
Don’t get her wrong, Jo knows some things; you can’t exactly live with someone without picking up on a few of their habits and Coral’s tendency to whine like a little goo-goo gaga baby whenever she spots a tomato in the kitchen, similar to her usual course of action involving most everything she despises, is anything but subtle.
Most people these days have their histories written all over their Inkstagrams, carved into the internet for years to come with countless selfies and videos of their trip to some city or other. But Coral’s presence, both online and off, is… ghostly, for lack of a better word. Aside from the bits of Grizzco she regularly haunts, traces of her activities are faint at best.
Her turf record is near nonexistent. What is there isn’t much, just enough matches to hit the quota Grizzco deemed acceptable for a new employee back in the fucking stone age when they opened their first branch in Inkopolis. And even then, those files are old enough they’re hard to dig up, left to rot on an aging website for an old Inkopolitan turf league that had fallen out of favor a few years ago. The fact Jo had been able to find any of Coral’s turfing information at all is really nothing short of a miracle.
Coral’s only real social media presence consists of a few recently created accounts Jo knows for a fact Coral made solely so she would stop spamming her texts with links to various posts she couldn’t open without the proper app and proper account.
Grizzco records aren’t public, Coral pays their landlord in cash, and one of Coral’s oldest—and only, as far as Jo can tell—friends, Triton, seems to know very little about her too aside from work and the details he does know he had apparently spent ages slowly wrenching from her grip.
So sue her, when Jo goes looking for something or another she’s already forgotten about (maybe some tiny pair of scissors? probably something like that, she forgets what it was, but she definitely needed to fix something with the abomination of a hat she’d already fucked up making) and instead stumbles upon what looks like an old, torn photograph that she’s never seen before while digging through the drawers of Coral’s bathroom counter, she’s curious.
The photo itself is barely visible, pinned to the bottom of the drawer by various assorted doodads and gizmos and mostly obscured by the crumpled remains of various Grizzco information pamphlets about events alre—hold up, wait a second, Coral still has that Wahoo World info sheet? Good cod, this drawer is a mess.
Jo spares a brief moment to skim through the pamphlet as she removes it from the drawer to set it aside and notes that she wasn’t crazy, the top 5% employee performance quotas really were lower back then. Not that she’d gotten anywhere close to one at the time, but still. Damn.
Carp, she’s getting distracted. What was it that had her digging again? Right. The photo.
Jo hesitates—one moment, two moments, three.
She really shouldn’t do this. By all means, this is a horrible idea. Coral will kill her if she finds out Jo messed with her shit again, this is probably an invasion of her privacy at best and crazy stalker behavior at worst, and honestly, it’s just a dick move all around to go snooping.
But.
But.
Saving the world earns her the right to be at least a little nosy, doesn’t it?
(Jo makes a bad decision and another domino falls, unseen and unheard.)
Inky little fingers shove the clutter aside and gently, slowly, wrap around the edges of the photograph. They pull it out, mindful of all its tears and creases, before holding it up for curious eyes to inspect.
Jo looks at the photo—really looks at it. She looks at the wrinkled, torn divots and dimples of the girls’ smiles, at the faded steel blue depths of their eyes, at the familiar face that shouldn’t be in a picture she found in her roommate’s bathroom.
She tries not to think about how if Coral let her tentacles down every once in a while and didn’t walk around with a near permanent scowl plastered across her fivehead face like a billboard, she maybe, just maybe, might resemble one or both of the octolings in this photo. She tries not to think about the implications of this photo being in Coral’s bathroom drawer and that its mere presence here implies she’s either in the pic or close with someone who was. She tries not to think about how one of the girls in this photo (who, mind you, look damn near identical to each other), looks a lot like Eight.
And for multiple reasons, the only thing Jo can really put eloquently as the gears in her brain start turning in an attempt to parse subject matter they were never prepared to handle is a single, extremely large ‘fuck.’
(One by one, one after another, dominoes topple over and the beginnings of a chain reaction fall into place.)
For as long as she can remember, Caroline has loved waking up to sunlight.
The warmth of its touch on her skin, its whispers in her ears of a beautiful day to come, they’re invigorating, a poignant reminder that she’s alive, that she’s okay, that she made it. It urges her onward to the day ahead with a shimmering laugh and a familiarly beautiful call of ‘hello’ that tells her none of her life is a dream, and the arms it drapes around her shoulders to hug at her skin at dawn are never quite as warm as the arms haphazardly slung across her waist when she wakes, but they are a close second.
Sunshine is a beautiful, bright, magical thing, but it is also bright and does not discriminate in what it shines on. The good, the bad, the ugly—come morning, everything is dragged back into the spotlight all the same.
Cordelia had lived for years in a world where she’d never felt the sun on her skin, in a world where she’d never felt the breeze weave its fingers through her tentacles. She had dreamed of being able to wake beneath a deep blue sky that wasn’t simulated, had longed for a world where she could use her knack for spotting movement in the distance to watch birds for hours instead of a scope.
Caroline has that—she has all of it. She wakes up to sunshine peeking through her window, in the arms of a partner who loves her unconditionally, to daily shellphone messages from friends who would die for her if she asked.
Caroline has everything. She has everything Cordelia wanted, everything Cordelia could ever dream of.
And yet.
And yet.
Trying to fit Cordelia’s memories into Caroline’s life has been something akin to shoving a great white shark in a bathtub, sharp teeth cutting at the edges and rough skin chafing as it tries to force itself in a place not built to house it.
Caroline had built her life on the surface with the assumption she may never have gotten to learn who Cordelia was. She’d picked a name for herself. She’d found a place. She’d found a family.
Cordelia? Cordelia had left her only family behind and hadn’t had the time to even think about looking back before the memories of her sister, of her life, of herself, of everything she was, were stolen.
They’re two halves of the same coin, warped and scuffed and rough along the edges, split apart with a knife that shaved off just enough of the metal to ensure the pieces would never fit quite right when stuck back together.
So when her phone buzzes—and when Thea’s buzzes not long after—on a lazy weekend afternoon they’ve both more than earned after everything, Caroline doesn’t pay it much mind.
Thea groans, waking up just enough to grab her phone off the nightstand and check her notifications. She blinks—once, twice, thrice, before slowly, carefully, sitting up and inspecting the contents of her screen.
There’s a pause, heavy and thick like hot tar, before Thea purses her lips and frowns.
“You… might want to take a look at your notifications.”
JoMama333xSwag Today, 12:02
@everyone look at these pics pls and tell me im seeing what i think im seeing. if im not full permission to ratio my ass for being stupid
just an fyi tho i rlly dont think im bein stupid
[ISMYROOMMATEACLONE.jpeg]
im not delusional right this is literally 8 in the pic
and possibly my roommate too? 😭😭😭 idfk whats happening oomfs squoomfs octoomfs, help me 😭 im gonna shit myself if i keep staring at this photo i feel like i got dementia from those knitting needles 🤡🤡 never get stuff secondhand from old people dude this shit must be haunted 🤡🤡🤡
on 2nd thought mayb that was karma for stealing things from them when i picked stuff up actually lmfao
i mean what who said that must have been the wind haha
anyways more pics (hopefully clearer i was in a bit of a rush on the first one mb)
[AMIDELUSIONAL.jpeg]
[SQUOOMFSHELP.jpeg]
[MYBRAINISUNDERFUCKINGATTACK.jpeg]
that should be all of them, i needed to get multiple angles just to be sure 👍 theyre all the same pic just with different filters over it. thoughts?
The Captain is typing…
The Captain Today, 12:15
@JoMama333xSwag Call me ASAP.
@everyone group meeting ASAP. Availability tonight?
Multiple users are typing…
The first morning Coral spent on the surface, she had woken to the glow of a rising sun.
They were a magical thing, really—those first rays of sunlight. Soft, gentle, warm. Brushing featherlight touches across her eyelids, they urged her to get up and nudged her toward the day ahead in a way so entirely unconvincing that it had Coral all at once understanding the hedonistic Inkling phenomenon of sleeping in late. The feeling of the sun on her skin was a home she had never known and one she never knew she longed for, so for just those few brief moments, when the glow of a new day had first introduced itself with a shimmering laugh and a beautiful call of ‘hello’, she didn’t move a muscle but to lazily blink a few times and soak it all in.
Fresh from her first proper night’s rest in ages, she hadn’t yet had the time to feel the crushing weight of her insecurities. She hadn’t yet felt the scraps of hope she’d shoved in her pockets for the road fade away like used ink, hadn’t yet realized the sizable holes in her hearts Cordelia had left behind would be less of a temporary problem and more of a permanent issue.
But as she sat in bed and stared up at the peeling paint of a shitty motel ceiling and the minutes slipped by, things got brighter. Clearer. Hotter. Light that had once gently nudged her awake started to nip at her eyelids and its warmth made her sheets feel suffocating. The cacophony of scrapes and bruises she had collected on her journey up all at once decided to remind her of their presence, howling with the leftover aches of battles already fought and already won. Threads of hope slipped through her fingers like oil, coating her every move in doubts she hadn’t fully realized had even been forming. And then—then, when the consequences of her journey to the surface finally started to hit her, when the realization that she could never go back, that this was it, truly sank in, Coral suddenly understood why hedonism was so dangerous: it came from a sense of peace she was not built for.
Linger too long in the distractions offered by creature comforts and they will drown you, suffocate you, leave you defenseless. They will smile at you as you rot from the inside out, will laugh at you as your feet sink deeper in the waters you haven’t yet realized you’re drowning in. Chasing after life’s pleasures is something best left to the innocent, the young, the ones still blissfully ignorant of everything they have to lose.
Coral was a soldier, a fighter, a warrior, a worker, and her trip to the surface had firmly put her at rock bottom. With or without Cordelia, she was never built for peace.
The foundations of her new existence were steadily poured over the bitter, rotting footprints of the girl she used to be, a trail hastily painted over the feelings she never dealt with in a blurry collage of blood, sweat and ink. She hid herself behind walls methodically assembled with bricks carefully molded from the ashes of the burnt bridges left in her wake and did her best to pretend the old, torn photo burning a hole in the drawer of her bathroom counter didn’t make her stomach churn every time she saw it, but it was a mask that had been covered in cracks long before Jo tried shoving her inky little fingers all over them.
Coral was not built for peace, but she had based her life on the surface on a singular fundamental truth: she would never see her sister again.
But as Coral stands there, as she looks into a pair of misty blue eyes that have haunted her mirror for years and watches the faint outline of a smile she hasn’t seen in what feels like eons crawl across the face of a dead girl walking, the ground under her feet shakes and the house of cards she had carefully, painstakingly maintained for years comes crashing down all at once.
Because there, standing in her doorway, tall and tired and oh-so-painfully real, is Cordelia in the flesh.
Coral, the girl who had waited and waited and waited until she couldn’t wait anymore, almost cries in joy at the sight.
Coral, the ex-elite who had waited and waited and waited until she couldn’t wait anymore, knows when the faint twisting of her gut means things are too good to be true and waits for the other shoe to drop.
Cordelia’s gaze pierces with the force of an E-Liter and there’s something so familiar about it that Coral almost wants to reach out and try and touch it.
What would it feel like, she wonders, to hold the gaze of a ghost? What would it feel like, to grasp the stare of a shadow? Would it be a soft, rosy thing, dipped in bittersweet nostalgia and left to soak in an eternity of memories long past? Would it ache like an old wound, oozing and peeling around the edges as the reality of what could have been and what never will be festers and twists the knife forever stuck in her chest?
All are questions Coral had long assumed would permanently go unanswered, because Cordelia is dead.
(Cordelia is dead and it’s her fault, she’s dead because she let her leave her behind, she’s deadeaddead—)
So, the fact of the matter is, for a dead girl to be standing in her doorway, one of two things must have occurred: she had either finally taken enough Cohock frying pan hits to the head to completely lose it and start hallucinating, or a dead girl had magically risen from the grave.
The first words out of Cordelia’s mouth, in typical Cordelia fashion, dig into their target’s weak points with pinpoint accuracy.
“Can we talk?” she asks, and Coral can’t answer.
She can’t think. She can’t speak. Her mouth is dry and her chest is tight and none of this feels real but for the fact her fingers are digging into her palms so hard that it hurts. The pain is grounding, in a fucked-up, dysfunctional sort of way—a concrete reminder that she’s here, that this is real, that she’s alive and face-to-face with a girl who shouldn’t be.
(Because if Cordelia were alive, a traitorous little voice whispers, then why did she never look for me before? Did she simply not care to? Did she still hate her for wanting to stay? If she were alive, then why did Coral never know before now?)
If the question here were simply whether they can talk, the answer would probably be no; Coral thinks she’s going to be sick.
Cordelia, with the same soft hints of a knowing smile, with the same sharp blue eyes, with the same dimples that have haunted Coral’s mirror for years and new scars peeking out from the edges of her turtleneck, takes Coral’s silence for the answer that it is and simply suggests, “Do you have a couch? It may be best that we both take a seat.”
Coral hesitates, tongue touching beak in a feeble attempt to dig up a slew of words she’d assembled for a situation like this and had long left to rot, decides she needs another cup of coffee to deal with any of this, and steps aside to let the twin she doesn’t know anymore into the home she’d built for herself, by herself.
Coral is half-tempted to ask if Cordelia wants a cup of coffee.
She should know better, honestly—Cordelia had always found coffee too bitter. Her sweet beak was a mile wide, her candy stash beneath her bunk always filled to the brim with whatever sugar she could get her hands on.
Still, that does not stop Coral from hesitating when grabbing herself a mug from the shelf in the kitchen and mentally debating whether to grab a second.
Because really, who’s to say Cordelia’s even the same person anymore?
The world had changed, after the two of them split up.
Everything changed. Life changed, Coral changed. The world still turned, the sun still rose, time went on. To expect Cordelia to have remained the same after all this time, after all they’d been through, would be nothing short of unrealistic.
But the torn, wrinkled part of Coral that had once been a sister still foolishly hopes. And it is that brief, single moment of bittersweet sentimentality, that brief, single moment of aching nostalgia to return to treasured moments long past, that has her other hand brushing the edges of Jo’s favorite mug before drawing back from the shelf empty.
She pretends not to notice the fact that her hands are trembling as she pours herself a cup of coffee.
(She’s waited years for this moment; she can’t afford to be weak now. Weakness is something afforded only to the young, the innocent, those who lie blissfully ignorant to all they have to lose. Coral is old and tired and quite good at hiding her scars behind the gloves of a black standard-issue Grizzco Gloopsuit. She’ll survive. She always has.)
She takes a deep breath—once, twice, thrice, slowly inhaling the steam of mediocre coffee in a poor attempt to steel her nerves.
It’s just a conversation. She can do this.
One step at a time, Cordelia walks out of the safety of her kitchen to have her first real conversation with her sister in years.
Cordelia tells her everything.
She tells her about the Deepsea Metro, about waking up with no memories and nothing to her name but the clothes on her back and an identification number given to her by a machine that wanted her dead. She tells her about working with Agent Three and Off the Hook to save the whole frickin’ world, about her struggles to find herself amongst the aftermath, about how she’d found a place for herself, how she’d picked a new name, made herself a new life, found herself a new family.
Coral tries not to feel guilty about it, tries not to think about all the time she’d wasted looking and searching and waiting and blaming someone who didn’t even remember who they were. She tries not to think about how her sister had very nearly died because Cordelia had set off alone, tries not to think about how all this suffering, all this hurt, could have been avoided had Coral not made one stupid, horrible, awful decision years ago, and does not fully succeed.
Cordelia tells her about the struggle of getting her memories back. About how she had thought, for a while, that she may never get any of them back at all. She tells her about the struggle to fit the memories of a girl who no longer existed into the life she has now, about how some of the missing pieces of her memory are likely lost forever. She tells her about how she’d remembered a sister she had no way of finding, with no papertrail to follow and records scrubbed from the books.
(Ages ago, on the day that ruined everything, Cordelia had told Coral that she was all blabber and no beak. That she was a coward, that she had no guts, that when it came down to it, she was all talk and no action.
And she was right: Coral was a coward. Coral is a coward.
Even after she’d made it to the surface, Coral gave up on ever finding her sister. She’d packed up everything, dropped off the grid to bury herself in work that never gave her time to think, and ran from her problems like she always did.
Once again, she’d hurt her sister in her cowardice.
Once again, Coral had made the wrong choice.)
Minute by minute, moment by moment, sentence by sentence, old wounds long hidden and long buried tear and crack and bleed. Blood drips on her fingers as Coral digs at her own palms, her eyes flooding with tears she could never afford herself to cry and still can’t.
“Ah. My apologies, I’ve barely even given you a turn to speak.” Cordelia smiles and it’s so bright that looking at it burns. “I suppose I was so excited at the chance to reconnect that I got a bit carried away. ”
And when Cordelia pauses, when she looks at Coral with those same blue eyes that have haunted her mirror for years, when the gaze of a ghost pierces her heart over and over and over and over, Coral thinks that she forgets how to breathe.
The past weeks’, months’, years’ woes flow through her like a broken dam, drowning out everything but the apologies that slip from her lips like a leaky faucet between shaky gasps for air.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. This is my fault, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry—”
Arms wrap around her shoulders. They’re scarred and warm and hold her far tighter than she likes, and their grasp is something simultaneously blurrily familiar and scarily new.
“I’m sorry too,” Cordelia murmurs. “And I’m sorry that you think this is your fault.”
And it’s then—then, with her sister’s arms around her tight, with her stomach in her throat and her lungs strangled by ghosts of her own making, that Coral falls apart for the second time that week.
Their story starts like this: a jaded Grizzco freelancer meets a squidiot coworker who looks like she’s going to crumble under the pressure of their shifts and observes as she doesn’t—again, and again, and again. It starts with ice blue eyes and a smile that lights up the sky, with painful reminders of things long left to fester and a stupid kid who just won’t let sleeping dogfish lie.
A squidiot worms her way into the life of a soldier, a warrior, a fighter, a worker, poking her inky little fingers in the holes littering the heart of a jaded Grizzco freelancer who likes to pretend she doesn’t have one. A jaded Grizzco freelancer finds a new sister, a squidiot coworker finds a family, and slowly, surely, the two of them form a rag-tag working group of Salmon Runners with the help of one of the freelancer’s only friends.
A squidiot coworker then stumbles into saving the whole frickin’ world, trips into a world of agents and ancient skeletons left to rot beneath the Earth and her roommate, her sister, is unknowingly dragged in along with her in the aftermath.
Their story ends like this: a jaded Grizzco freelancer lives with a squidiot coworker who looks like she’s going to crumble under the pressure of their shifts and observes as she doesn’t—again, and again, and again. It ends with ice blue eyes and a smile that lights up the sky, with painful reminders of things long left to fester and a stupid kid who just won’t let sleeping dogfish lie.
Their story ends like this: long lost sisters reunite, and a girl who had refused to allow herself to be anything but a soldier, a warrior, a fighter, a worker, finally begins to heal.